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Stories from SlateThe Royal Baby Has Arrived!http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/07/royal_baby_watch_kate_middleton_is_in_labor_and_it_s_totally_healthy_for.html
<p>Last month, the magazine rack at Partridges, an upscale grocery store on Duke of York Square in West London, was a disquieting sight. “Palace’s Baby Plan Revealed,” <em>People</em> magazine promised. <em>OK</em> claimed to be “First for Royal Baby news,” while <em>Hello</em> offered the opportunity to “Meet the ‘Amazing Man’ who will deliver the Royal Baby.” Two glossy pseudo-books were present too, with intriguingly disparate approaches to royal nomenclature: Andrew Morton’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312643403/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0312643403&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>William &amp; Catherine</em></a> vied off with <em>Kate and William</em> from the WP Collectors series.</p>
<p>This, all before the royal baby had even begun its descent through the birth canal. Now that 31-year-old Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge and wife to the second in line to the British throne, is in labor [<em><strong>Update, 3:45 p.m.:</strong> It's a boy!</em>], we have, I believe, neared peak mania. And peak mania is an ugly thing.</p>
<p>Or maybe it’s healthy. Middleton, after all, is not Michelle Obama. She is not married to the most powerful man on the planet. Though the political emasculation of constitutional monarchies is not completely straightforward—in 1981, for example, King Juan Carlos I of Spain played a sizeable role in derailing an attempted coup d’&eacute;tat, and even William’s father Prince Charles has repeatedly pushed the bounds of his theoretically apolitical status—royalty, at least in Europe these days, does not helm the ship of state. Monarchy therefore takes our basic human urge to bow before power and redirects that urge toward a politically insignificant quantity. That is a good thing.</p>
<p>Of course, this argument does not make the hysteria about Britain’s Royal Birth much less absurd. In the course of research for this article I requested an interview with Jane Bruton, editor-in-chief of the British edition of celebrity weekly<em> Grazia. </em>I was interested to hear the thinking behind recent stories like “Royal Baby Beauty: what products will Kate Middleton pack in her Hospital Bag?” and “Royal Baby Countdown: Is Kate Middleton planning a hypno birth?” Curiously, Bruton’s PR people declined. Likewise, I paced the streets of affluent West London, visiting upmarket baby shops that stocked minuscule cashmere cardigans for &pound;57 ($87) and linen romper suits for &pound;80 ($120). There, a woman with cut glass accents admitted coyly that “she’s been in,” but would disclose no more, as though to say what Kate actually bought would be an act of Snowden-scale whistle-blowing.</p>
<p>So, yes, absurd. But hasn’t it always been? While celebrity culture is no doubt turbocharged by the communications technology of the modern age, I cannot but think it fundamentally reflects a deeper human need, at least since the advent of the printing press. To read an account of the reception of Romantic poet Byron in London after the publication of his tyro work “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” 201 years ago is, for example, to see that perhaps not much has changed. “The subject of conversation, of curiosity, of enthusiasm ... of the moment is not Spain or Portugal, warriors or patriots, but Lord Byron,” wrote the Duchess of Devonshire at the time.</p>
<p>Perhaps a poet is more worthy of our ogling than an almost-newborn baby who is already famous for being famous. But if celebrity worship is at least partially intrinsic, then let the subject of hysteria be without hard power. Kate Middleton’s sartorial decisions are literally market moving, but she does not deploy nuclear submarines, nor is she close to anyone who does. In other words, better to be in love with her bump than Michelle Obama’s upper arms.</p>
<p>Defenders of monarchy often reel out the fact that many of the world’s most progressive societies (Norway, the Netherlands) have kept their kings. My defense, however—which is basically that it is wise to separate power and pomp—is more informed by my recent experiences working as a reporter in West Africa. There the situation was quite the opposite. While generalizations are perilous, there is a common thread in much of West African culture relating to the absolute nature of political power, the ceremony of office and the taboo of questioning authority. The Big Man lives. In Sierra Leone, the country I know best, the president was routinely called the “Father of the Nation.” To question him meant violating his prestige, and that was an abomination. In such a system the opportunities for accountability are limited. And while prestige and status are somewhat different quantities in contemporary Britain, the royalty are a useful lighting rod for the urges to worship we do still have.</p>
<p>If West Africa is an extreme example of the problems of grandeur within the body politic, then America, while evidently less extreme, is also a telling case study. We are back to Michelle Obama’s formidable upper arms. I lived in New York for 16 months and was astonished at the imperial scope of the presidency; frankly I found it dangerous. POTUS is the most powerful man in the world, and that is all the more reason for not treating him as such. More insidious are the second order consequences of fawning—the obsession with Jackie Kennedy’s dresses, Hillary Clinton’s hair, the Obama girls’ school choices, and of course that Portuguese Water Dog. Much of this fluff is an indication of the unpleasant reality that women in public life are still judged on different grounds than men, but it also indicates that America needs to direct its reverent urges beyond the presidency. Hollywood actors, sports superstars, and even reality TV participants—all in plentiful supply in contemporary America—cannot match monarchy when it comes to deflecting mankind’s worse tendencies away from politicians.&nbsp;</p>
<p>(There is an alternative possibility here of course; the fact that even if the British public wished to direct their celebrity obsessions onto their elected officers, said leaders would simply not be able to absorb them. Attempts at hero-worship might simply slide off the sloping shoulders of Deputy Prime Minster Nick Clegg, or opposition leader Ed Milliband. No Obamas, they.)</p>
<p>Earlier this year Hillary Mantel, the author of high caliber historical novels, gave a speech on “Royal Bodies” that was <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n04/hilary-mantel/royal-bodies">later printed in the<em> London Review of Books</em></a>. It was a finessed piece, which moved from discussion of Kate to the matrimonial challenges of Tudor monarch Henry VIII. After the story’s publication, the British popular press laid into Mantel. They charged her with denigrating the Duchess of Cambridge. The right-leaning <em>Daily Mail</em> accused Mantel of a “venomous attack.” But to me it seemed that their real accusation was one drawn from the early modern period in which Mantel sets her novels: usurpation of prerogative. The tabloids know it is their customary lot to tear down when the building up is done. They did it to Sarah, Duchess of York, unfortunate ex-wife of the queen’s second son Andrew, and also to Princess Diana. The monarchical lighting rod conducts both praise and scorn.</p>
<p>It is for that reason that it is possible to conceive of genuine pity for the royal baby-to-be, and also to not be able to look away. We’ve seen this with the young British princes, who were born into a public role that they did not choose. While the expenditure of public money on their upkeep is distasteful there is genuine pathos to their situation. Sympathy for Kate is more complicated; it is hard not to conceive of her present position as the result of a pact that bordered on the Faustian, but likewise I wonder whether she could truly have made an informed consent, to have known when she dreamed of marrying her prince what the real levels of intrusion and consequent personal limitation would be.</p>
<p>As Sarah Lyall, the sharp-penned <em>New York Times</em> correspondent, has pointed out, Britain remains a deeply repressed society. But repression is not the entire truth. Certain aspects of British culture are vastly more confrontational than their American counterparts. No American president ever faces a public mauling comparable to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_minister's_questions">prime minister’s questions</a>, and the gladiatorial interviews on the BBC’s <em>Today Programme</em> make <em>Meet the Press</em> look like a mutual appreciation society. It is perhaps true that these occasions are the repressed rage of the ages seeping through any available fissure, but maybe that’s not so bad. British society has created conduits and venues in which our most bellicose, and in many ways basest, desires can be conducted in a controlled environment. If you must kneel, kneel at the newsstand.</p>Mon, 22 Jul 2013 14:24:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/07/royal_baby_watch_kate_middleton_is_in_labor_and_it_s_totally_healthy_for.htmlSimon Akam2013-07-22T14:24:00ZWhy it's perfectly fine to obsess.Double XThe Royal Baby Has Arrived! It's Perfectly Fine to Obsess.100130722006kate middletonroyal familykate middletonroyal familySimon AkamDoublexhttp://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/07/royal_baby_watch_kate_middleton_is_in_labor_and_it_s_totally_healthy_for.htmlfalsefalsefalseThe Royal Baby Has Arrived! It's Perfectly Fine to Obsess.The Royal Baby Has Arrived! It's Perfectly Fine to Obsess.Photo by CARL COURT/AFP/Getty ImagesA well-wisher waits for the royal baby outside the Lindo Wing of Saint Mary's Hospital in London, on July 12, 2013George W. Bush’s Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandfather Was a Slave Traderhttp://www.slate.com/articles/life/history_lesson/2013/06/george_w_bush_and_slavery_the_president_and_his_father_are_descendants_of.html
<p>BUNCE ISLAND, Sierra Leone—Twelve American presidents owned slaves, eight while serving in office, and at least 25 presidents count slave owners among their ancestors. But new historical evidence shows that a direct ancestor of George W. and George H.W. Bush was part of a much more appalling group: Thomas Walker was a notorious slave trader active in the late 18<sup>th</sup> century along the coast of West Africa.</p>
<p>Walker, George H.W. Bush's great-great-great grandfather, was the captain of, master of, or investor in at least 11 slaving voyages to West Africa between 1784 and 1792.</p>
<p>Scores of European merchants and American plantation owners grew rich on the trade that transported more than 10 million Africans to North America, the Caribbean, and Brazil between 1550 and 1850. Bush's family, like many others, has previously been identified as slave owners in the United States. In the late 18<sup>th</sup> and early 19<sup>th</sup> centuries, at least five Walker family households, George W. Bush’s ancestors by his father’s mother, <a href="http://www.illinoistimes.com/Springfield/article-3993-legacy.html">owned slaves in Maryland’s Cecil County</a>.&nbsp;</p>
<p>But this is the first time an ancestor of Bush has been directly linked to the brutal trans-Atlantic trade in which millions perished. When I queried the New England Historic Genealogical Society, which publishes ancestries of American presidents, the only other president they flagged up with definite slave dealer ancestry was Thomas Jefferson, whose father-in-law, John Wayles (1715-1773), was a planter, slave trader and lawyer in the Virginia Colony. (The NEHGS did acknowledge that there could be other presidents with slavers as ancestors.)</p>
<p>The discovery of the slave-trading ancestor of the Presidents Bush was made by two men: Roger Hughes, a retired newspaper editor and genealogist in Illinois who has previously documented other Bush ancestors as slave owners in the United States, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Opala">Joseph Opala</a>, an American historian who has spent much of his adult life in Sierra Leone, the former British colony on the West African coast.</p>
<p>Opala heads a project to preserve <a href="http://www.bunce-island.org/">Bunce Island</a>, a slave fort 20 miles upriver from Sierra Leone's coastal capital, Freetown, where Thomas Walker bought Africans in the late 18<sup>th</sup> century. On Bunce Island thick jungle hems in the hulking ruins of the slave fort, abandoned after Britain banned the slave trade in 1807 and left largely untouched since then. Gravestones record the names of long-dead slavers.</p>
<p>As Hughes conducted genealogical research into Bush's ancestors, he began to suspect that two Thomas Walkers in the historical record—one a British-born merchant and known ancestor of the Bushes, the other a slave ship captain who journeyed to Bunce Island—might be the same man. The known Bush ancestor married in 1785 at Bristol, which along with London and Liverpool was one of the three British cities highly involved in the Atlantic slave trade. He later emigrated to the United States, applying for naturalization at New York in 1792, which he received two years later, and purchasing property at Burlington, N.J., in 1795.</p>
<p>At Opala's recommendation Hughes sent scans of the two Walkers' signatures to <a href="http://history.yale.edu/people/maija-jansson">Maija Jansson</a>, a handwriting analyst at Yale University, without any information on their provenance. Jansson confirmed that the signatures were from the same individual.</p>
<p>&quot;The angle and slope of the writing is the same on all of the signatures,&quot; Jansson told <strong><em>Slate </em></strong>in an email. &quot;The initial letter of the family name, 'W', is the same form in each, as is the initial 'T' of the Christian name.&quot;</p>
<p>&quot;The decorative loop under the signature is a key and is virtually the same in the letters,&quot; she said.</p>
<p>Margaret White, a handwriting expert I contacted, confirmed that the signatures were from the same hand. Likewise, Keith McClelland, a research associate at the Legacies of British Slave Ownership Project at University College London, also examined the documents and came to the same conclusion. &quot;Having examined the handwriting examples, it is clear that this was the same man,” he said. &quot;Having seen some of the documentation, there seems to me little doubt that the connection between Walker the slave trader and the current Bush family is also undeniable.&quot;</p>
<p>Hughes said he was convinced, based on the historical evidence, that Bush's forebear Walker was the same man as the known slave trader. &quot;If I had to testify to this, I'd say this is the same guy.</p>
<p>If it's not the same guy, I'm going to the gallows.&quot;</p>
<p>The Bush family's spokesman in Houston, Jim McGrath, had no comment on the findings. The George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas did not respond to multiple requests for comment, nor did Jeb Bush spokeswoman Jaryn Emhof.</p>
<p>The signatures of Thomas Walker, the known Bush ancestor, come from documents recording his marriage to Catherine McLelland in February 1785 in Bristol. They are preserved in the Bristol Record Office. The signatures of the known slave dealer Walker were drawn from two letters dated June 23 and July 2, 1787, the first written at Bunce Island and the second at the Banana Islands, which lie off the Sierra Leone coast. These letters are preserved in the British National Archives at Kew.</p>
<p>The letters, addressed to Bristol slave dealer James Rogers, show Walker complaining about the high cost of slaves. The June 23 letter states: &quot;Times on the coast is by no means as favourable as I expected. Slaves is at the price of 150 [illegible] and the coast seemes [sic] to be lin'd with vessels of all kind.&quot;</p>
<p>The July 2 letter says: &quot;I have purchased seventeen fine negroes and am this day proceeding down the coast to try what I do can there. Slaves is at a very greate [sic] price.&quot;</p>
<p>The Thomas Walker who married Catherine McLelland is identified as Bush's ancestor in Gary Boyd Roberts' <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0936124199/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0936124199&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>Ancestors of American Presidents</em></a>, published by the New England Historic Genealogical Society.</p>
<p>Roberts said that while he had not known of Walker's slave dealing, the finding did not surprise him, given that the Walkers were a mercantile family and Baltimore, where they established themselves in the United States, was a hub for the slave trade. &quot;It would strike me as being perfectly logical and perfectly expectable,&quot; he told <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>.</p>
<p>The historical evidence suggests that Thomas Walker died at sea in 1797 when his own crew mutinied and threw him overboard. Documents in the British House of Lords Sessional Papers indicate Thomas Walker is the same man as a “Beau Walker,” whose unpleasant end is in turn recorded in the journal of Zachary Macaulay, a British anti-slavery activist, sometime governor of Sierra Leone and father of the celebrated Whig historian Thomas Macaulay.</p>
<p><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=QfwAAAAAYAAJ&amp;pg=PA141&amp;lpg=PA141&amp;dq=Zachary+Macaulay+beau+walker&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=yBdIWSHGva&amp;sig=G4V3ur8OVTd1foQe-iTsW8cO_ak&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=5W2_Ua_HOJen4AP_y4EY&amp;ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;q=Zachary%20Macaulay%20beau%20walker&amp;f=fa">Macaulay’s journal entry</a> for Oct. 24, 1797, is as follows:</p>
<p>“You have heard of the noted Beau Walker, an English slave trader of these parts.&nbsp;He arrived at the Isles Du Los [off present-day Guinea] lately in an American Brig being bound to Cape Mount [in present-day northwest Liberia] for slaves. He had scarce arrived at the last place, when exercising his usual barbarities on his officers &amp; crew, they were provoked to conspire against him. &nbsp;As he lay on one of the hencoops a seaman came up &amp; struck him on the breast with a handspike, but the blow being ill directed, did not produce its intended effect and Walker springing up wd soon have sacrificed the mutineer to his fury, had not a boy at the helm, pulling a pistol from his breast, shot him dead on the spot. His body was immediately thrown overboard. Thus ended Walker’s career, an end worthy of such a life. The vessel left Cape Mount, and it is supposed has gone for the Brazils or South Seas. There could not possibly have been a more inhuman monster than this Walker. Many a poor seaman has been brought by him to an untimely end.”</p>
<p>Thomas Walker and Catherine McLelland had three children, Rosetta, Thomas, and George, born between 1785 and 1797. Their younger son, George’s, descendants include the Presidents Bush. After Thomas Walker’s death, Catherine moved with the three children from Burlington, N.J., to Philadelphia, where in May 1801 she remarried to a man called Robert Hodgson. While records are scarce, it seems that Thomas Walker’s slave trading did not bestow lasting prosperity on his family. George E. Walker lost property in Maryland’s Cecil County inherited by his wife, Harriet, and the subsequent rise of the Walker family began several decades later, after they moved to Illinois in 1838.</p>
<p>On his 2003 visit to Goree Island, a former slave fort off the coast of the Senegalese capital, Dakar, George W. Bush <a href="http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/07/20030708-1.html">denounced the slave trade</a> as one of &quot;the greatest crimes of history.”</p>
<p>&quot;Small men took on the powers and airs of tyrants and masters,&quot; he said. &quot;Some have said we should not judge their failures by the standards of a later time. Yet, in every time, there were men and women who clearly saw this sin and called it by name.&quot;</p>
<p>While Bush's distant ancestors may have been involved in exploiting African slaves, his own presidency won praise from many poverty campaigners for its work on the continent. Bush backed debt forgiveness for 21 African states, and his President's Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR) pumped billions of dollars into antiretroviral drugs for HIV/AIDS sufferers, saving millions of lives in Africa.</p>Thu, 20 Jun 2013 09:44:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/life/history_lesson/2013/06/george_w_bush_and_slavery_the_president_and_his_father_are_descendants_of.htmlSimon Akam2013-06-20T09:44:00ZA surprising new discovery about the notorious Thomas “Beau” Walker.LifeNew Discovery: George W. Bush Is the Descendant of a Notorious Slave Trader100130620002historygeorge w. bushSimon AkamHistoryhttp://www.slate.com/articles/life/history_lesson/2013/06/george_w_bush_and_slavery_the_president_and_his_father_are_descendants_of.htmlfalsefalsefalseNew Discovery: George W. Bush Is the Descendant of a Notorious Slave TraderNew Discovery: George W. Bush Is the Descendant of a Notorious Slave TraderDrawing by William Smith, surveyor for the Royal African Co. of England, 1726Please Do Not Chillaxhttp://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_good_word/2013/03/chillax_wikipedia_and_bridezilla_are_not_puns_against_adjoinages.html
<p>I am appalled by <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008J47IWC/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=B008J47IWC&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20">Bridezillas</a></em>. I should make it clear that I have never seen an episode of the reality show. I hate <em>Bridezillas</em> for one simple reason: <em>Bride</em> does not rhyme with <em>god</em>. Ergo, <em>Bridezillas</em> is not a functioning pun.</p>
<p>The point is significant because <strong>bridezilla</strong> appears to be symptomatic of a wider malaise: the death of the American pun, replaced by something grosser, dumber, uglier. Examples abound: Take one of the most read websites in the world, <strong>Wikipedia</strong>, a “pun” on <em>encyclopedia</em> that shares nothing but its suffix. Or <strong>techpreneur</strong>, the loathsome fusion of <em>technology</em> and <em>entrepreneur</em>. Likewise <strong>mansplain</strong>, a coinage popular with Internet feminists that adroitly glosses a man addressing a woman in a condescending fashion (e.g., “Akam mansplains that <em>mansplain</em> is not a functioning pun.”) but is still not a functioning pun. <strong>Manscaping</strong>, the removal of all or part of male body hair, is better—there is at least assonance between the vowel sounds in <em>man</em> and <em>land</em>—but as a pun it remains perilously borderline.</p>
<p>So if <strong>recessionista</strong> and <strong>fembot</strong> are not really puns, what are they? They’re neolexic portmanteaus, in which root words are brutally slammed together with cavalier lack of wit. “Neolexic portmanteau” is a mouthful, so instead we shall choose a simpler handle. <em>Sherry-manteau</em>, <em>catastrounity</em>, <em>misceg-formation</em>, <em>piss-poortmanteau</em>, and <em>poor-man’s-toes</em> all proffer themselves as alternatives, but they are still laborsome. Therefore, I christen these neolexic portmanteaus <em>adjoinages</em>—a functioning portmanteau pun, in case you failed to see, on <em>adjoin</em> and <em>coinage</em>.</p>
<p>Gentle reader, are they not hideous things? If you are not yet convinced, brace yourself now for a tsunami of adjoinages. <strong>Stagflation</strong>, <strong>bootylicious</strong>, <strong>aeromotional,</strong> <strong>chillax</strong>, <strong>f---tard</strong>, <strong>bardolatry</strong>, <strong>bicurious</strong>, <strong>feminazi</strong>. All failed puns. There are others too that sit, manscaping-like, in the liminal territory of borderline pundom. <strong>Freakonomics</strong> works if the more conventional academic discipline is <em>eek-onomics</em>. It fails grimly if you say <em>ek-onomics</em>; vowel length is all.</p>
<p>One erudite friend of mine suggests that the current crisis in American wordplay can be traced back to the Watergate scandal of the 1970s and the subsequent tendency to append any scandal-related noun with the suffix <em>-gate</em>. Before Nixon fell, my friend suggests, “All American puns rhymed perfectly and snappily, as if the whole country were a Cole Porter musical.” While this may not be precisely accurate, it is true that in the United States puns have come in and out of favor over time.</p>
<p>John Pollack, the author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1592406750/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1592406750&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>The Pun Also Rises</em></a>, a book-length exposition on the subject, suggests the 19<sup>th</sup> century was a gilded age for American wordplay. As evidence he points to Abraham Lincoln’s coinage of “Michigander” for a native of Michigan, Congressman Horace Mann and Sen. Lewis Cass’ punning duel in an 1850 debate on slavery ( “This Ass is very big. Then call him CAss; C’s Roman for 100—a hundred times an Ass”), and frontiersman Davy Crockett’s status as both a celebrated punster and subject of puns (How many ears does Davy Crockett have? Three: A right ear, a left ear, and a wild frontier).</p>
<p>In Pollack’s view the American pun persisted through vaudeville and comedians like the Marx Brothers and George Burns, before falling out of favor after World War II, as falling taboos made previously forbidden topics (e.g., divorce, sex, general dysfunction) legitimate material for a new American humor less reliant on wordplay.</p>
<p>When I spoke with Pollack, he, alarmingly, was unperturbed by the current proliferation of nonfunctioning portmanteau puns; adjoinages worry him not. “Phonetic purity is a lovely thing, but we don’t live in a perfect world,” he told me. Indeed, Pollack believes the American pun is currently enjoying a renaissance, as an irreverent trope for an irreverent age and a method of branding new phenomena or technology in a time drenched with information.</p>
<p>It is certainly true that, despite the proliferation of adjoinages, the functioning pun is not wholly dead in early 21<sup>st</sup> century America, nor has its production ceased. We cannot ignore <strong>mandate</strong> for a dinner meeting of men, nor its baser cousins <strong>bromance,</strong> <strong>gaydar</strong>, and <strong>staycation</strong>. Likewise <strong>Bennifer</strong> merits inclusion, not least because the pitch-perfect Ben/Jen rhyme is so much neater than the Obama/Abomi vowel mismatch in Tea Party favorite <strong>Obamanation</strong> which, while still just about a functioning pun, borders on honorary adjoinage status.</p>
<p>The final defense of the pun in comparison to the adjoinage can only be made by turning to the very highest example of the former breed. The English language is rich in puns both wondrous and functional, from the lofty (British architect Sir Edwin Lutyens’ timeless riff on Philippians 4:7 in the King James Bible, mouthed in response to questionable seafood: “the piece of cod, which passeth all understanding”) to the base (Dorothy Parker’s “You can lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her think”). As the finest functioning portmanteau pun I would choose <strong>metrosexual</strong>; in its mere 19 years of existence the word has achieved ubiquity on both sides of the Atlantic, probably because it defined a pre-existing trend rather than trying to will a social development into being through verbal fireworks alone. (I’m looking at you, <strong>guyliner</strong>.) <strong>Metrosexual </strong>may be outnumbered by today’s flood of adjoinages, but it shows that success does not demand the compromise of principle. &nbsp;</p>
<p>So we can fight back! We cannot ignore the troublesome evidence of history, which suggests that, over time, ghastly adjoinages can become so embedded in the language that we forget the ugly process of their parturition. (Whence, let us consider, did <strong>paratrooper </strong>and<strong> camcorder</strong> come?) Responsibility for the American pun’s dire straits rests with the maker, and in this field, the author is not dead. Any copy editor, cable station line producer, or entertainment magazine photo captioner who opts for an adjoinage in lieu of at least attempting a functioning pun is clearly a creature of crushingly limited personal ambition. Such an intellectual pygmy must be responsible for naming <em>Bridezillas</em>, as opposed to the striding prince among men who, from the same marriage-themed source materials, christened the 2004 romantic musical film <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00094AS9U/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=B00094AS9U&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20">Bride and Prejudice</a></em>. Now <em>that</em> was pun for the books.</p>Wed, 06 Mar 2013 10:37:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_good_word/2013/03/chillax_wikipedia_and_bridezilla_are_not_puns_against_adjoinages.htmlSimon Akam2013-03-06T10:37:00ZAdjoinages and the death of the American pun.Life“Bridezilla” Is Not a Pun, and You Are Not Clever100130306002languagehumorSimon AkamThe Good Wordhttp://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_good_word/2013/03/chillax_wikipedia_and_bridezilla_are_not_puns_against_adjoinages.htmlfalsefalsefalse“Bridezilla” Is Not a Pun, and You Are Not Clever“Bridezilla” Is Not a Pun, and You Are Not CleverIllustration by Charile PowellFiner Charactershttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2013/02/the_most_attractive_women_in_novels_and_poems_great_gatsby_sun_also_rises.html
<p><em><strong>And who are the <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2013/02/the_most_attractive_men_in_novels_and_poems_great_gatsby_lonesome_dove_the.html">most attractive male characters in literature</a>? Ask Rachel Syme.</strong></em></p>
<p><em><strong></strong></em>Characters in literature are the antithesis of today’s pornography culture. A female character in a novel is never seen in the flesh and, except in the bitchiest <em>roman </em><em>&agrave;</em><em> clef</em>, her creation degraded no one. Instead, she exists only on the page, where the reader can access what remains the most private part of any human: her mind. For that reason, a woman in fiction is still the ultimate thinking man’s—or woman’s—pin-up.</p>
<p>Take <strong>Alejandra</strong> in Cormac McCarthy’s novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679744398/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0679744398&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>All the Pretty Horses</em></a>. The daughter of a Mexican gentleman-rancher, she bewitches aspirant cowboy John Grady Cole. Alejandra, with “the nape of her neck pale as porcelain,” is beautiful, but what compels Cole—and readers—is her carefully modulated inaccessibility. She and Cole sleep together, before she honors her promise to her family to break off the affair. Alejandra therefore sits at the exact interstice of prohibition and possibility.</p>
<p>The second category of literary siren is a function of what David Foster Wallace’s former editor Michael Pietsch referred to as “the physics of reading.” A character met in a book will never have to be actually lived with. Hence literature is the perfect habitat for the enchanting-cum-infuriating seductress. First in this category is <strong>Pamela Flitton</strong> in Anthony Powell’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226677141/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0226677141&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>A</em> <em>Dance to the Music of Time</em></a>. In 1940s London she behaves appallingly to the Allied officers who are infatuated with her; we see her “surveying the street with her usual look of hatred and despair.” Later Pamela throws her novelist lover’s manuscript into a canal. Other such temptresses include <strong>Becky Sharp</strong> from William Thackeray’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1853260193/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1853260193&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>Vanity Fair</em></a> and <strong>Manon Lescaut</strong> in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abb%C3%A9_Pr%C3%A9vost"><u>Abb&eacute; Pr&eacute;vost</u></a>’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0199554927/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0199554927&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20">eponymous 18<sup>th</sup> century French novel</a>.</p>
<p>A strand of criticism maintains that Ernest Hemingway could not draw plausible women, but for some readers the occasionally androgynous Hemingway heroine remains the ideal literary fantasy object. “Damned good-looking” <strong>Brett Ashley</strong> in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0743297334/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0743297334&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>The Sun Also Rises</em></a> narrowly defeats Catherine Barkley from <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684801469/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0684801469&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20">A Farewell to Arms</a> </em>on the back of a single simile: Brett, Hemingway writes, is “built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht.” Another interwar candidate demands inclusion, of course: <strong>Daisy Buchanan</strong> from Fitzgerald’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0743273567/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0743273567&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>The Great Gatsby</em></a>, with her “voice full of money.”</p>
<p>If literature can paint a woman in exacting detail, it can also conjure appeal in the opposite fashion, by saying very little. Byron’s poem “<a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173100">She Walks in Beauty</a>” stretches to a mere 18 lines, and never names the <strong><em>She</em></strong> who “walks in beauty, like the night/Of cloudless climes and starry skies.” She is, though, so attractive precisely because she is little known—a woman painted so economically is a screen on which readers can project their own private desires.</p>
<p>The classical world also provides a number of potential candidates, notably steadfast Penelope from the <em>Odyssey</em>. However, clich&eacute;d as it is, and although she spends much of the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0140445927/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0140445927&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>Iliad</em></a> moaning, <strong>Helen of Troy </strong>wins inclusion here on the grounds that hers is still <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2004/05/the_many_faces_of_helen.html">the face that launched a thousand ships</a>.</p>
<p>Now sex. The spiritual home of the “hottest women” list is the kind of publication known in my home country of Britain as a lad’s mag. To ape their vernacular, one could include <strong>O</strong>, from Anna Desclos’ erotic novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345301110/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0345301110&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>The Story of O</em></a>, on the simple grounds that she would let you do absolutely anything to her. On a more tasteful level, O wins inclusion because her fusion of polished fashion photographer and bondage slave is a riff on that timeless male obsession; the Madonna/whore dichotomy. &nbsp;</p>
<p>Finally, in Mikhail Bulgakov’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0802130119/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0802130119&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>The Master and Margarita</em></a>, <strong>Margarita</strong> exhibits unflappable enthusiasm for her boyfriend’s unpublished writing and also raises no objections to his preference for sitting at home trying to write a novel in lieu of getting a proper job. She seems perfectly calculated to appeal not only to those who read fiction but also to those poor sods who aspire to write it themselves.</p>
<p>---</p>
<p><em>See all the pieces in&nbsp;</em><a href="http://www.slate.com/books"><em>this month’s&nbsp;<strong>Slate Book Review</strong></em></a><em>.</em><em><br /> <em>Sign up for the&nbsp;</em></em><a href="http://synd.slate.com/signup/"><strong><em>Slate Book Review</em></strong><em>&nbsp;monthly newsletter</em></a><em>.</em></p>Sat, 02 Feb 2013 04:02:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2013/02/the_most_attractive_women_in_novels_and_poems_great_gatsby_sun_also_rises.htmlSimon Akam2013-02-02T04:02:00ZBrett Ashley, Daisy Buchanan, and the 10 most attractive women in literature.ArtsWell, How About It? Daisy Buchanan or Becky Sharp?100130201020lovedoublexsexvalentine's daysbr213booksslate book reviewSimon AkamBookshttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2013/02/the_most_attractive_women_in_novels_and_poems_great_gatsby_sun_also_rises.htmlfalsefalsefalseWell, How About It? Daisy Buchanan or Becky Sharp?Well, How About It? Daisy Buchanan or Becky Sharp?Illustration by Mike Norton